Commissioner Laura Carstensen is credited as the author of the following gem:

Research shows that diverse boards produce better performance and many companies recognise this. However, there is still much more to be done to improve the representation of women at board level. The aim of this project is to help companies do more to open up the field of board appointments which will help them achieve better results for their company by widening the talent pool. We look forward to working with BIS to shape the project to ensure it’s effective in tackling this issue.

We’re about to email a link to this piece to the EHRC, with the following public challenge to Ms Carstensen:

Your comments (above) clearly imply there’s a causal link between increasing the proportion of women on company boards, and enhanced financial performance. In the course of the past two years Campaign for Merit in Business http://c4mb.wordpress.com has challenged dozens of organisations (including DBIS) and hundreds of individual proponents of ‘more women on boards’ to provide evidence for such a causal link, and no evidence has ever been forthcoming. This is a FOI request asking you to provide evidence of the causal link you’ve implied. Please don’t waste our time pointing us to reports and studies (e.g. McKinsey, Credit Suisse, Catalyst, Thomson Reuters) which show correlations but then make it clear those correlations aren’t evidence of causation and nor do they imply it. Thank you. You might like to read our briefing paper which has the Abstracts of five longitudinal studies showing that increasing female representation on boards leads to financial performance decline: